Playing With Electricity

I wrote a new album:

https://danmckee.bandcamp.com/album/playing-with-electricity

This album began life as a personal challenge.  Could I write a new song every month for a year?  And could I write those songs on an instrument I do not really know how to play?  Not that I really know how to play any instrument - including the bass guitar I have played for decades.  Bass is something I play only by feel and by ear.  I’ve never had a proper lesson.

But I wanted to write some music without using my bass guitar at all.  Christmas 2022 and my wife gets me an Arturia KeyLab 49.  A synthesiser keyboard.  Along with the Logic Pro software I use to record my Strangely Shaped By Fathers punk rock stuff I realised that was everything I needed to give this challenge a go.  Twelve months.  Twelve new songs.  Let’s see what happens…

What happened was twelve songs very different from anything I was doing in Strangely Shaped By Fathers.  Different from anything I’ve ever done really.  It was closer to my early ANARCHOPHY stuff I did when I first started figuring out GarageBand but without the embarrassing attempt at doing hip hop.  More musicality.  Influences borrowed from everywhere.  And lyrics reflecting whatever was going on in my life that month.  Informed by the period in which I was writing.  I loved what I was producing.  It wasn’t punk rock in sound, but it was punk rock in spirit.  DIY as fuck and speaking my own personal truth to powers big and small.

Most songs were written and recorded in an evening or two, after a long day at work.  Very few takes.  Usually I sang the melodies for the first time as I was recording them.  Inventing on the fly and figuring out what moved me.  Deleting what didn’t.  Having brief bursts of inspiration that I couldn’t necessarily replicate and do better.  When you set yourself the challenge of not only writing but recording a new song every month and you’re not a professional musician, you have to find whatever spare moments you can to do the work.  That means you can’t fuck around looking for perfection.  None of this is perfect, and that’s what makes it perfect.

I didn’t really talk about what I was doing with anyone besides my wife.  In April, when I wrote the song Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher to celebrate Earth Island Books agreeing to publish my book of the same name, I wrote it on the synthesiser and recorded it like that originally.  But decided to re-record a more traditionally ‘punk’ version and release it to promote the book under the Strangely Shaped By Fathers name.  By October, when it seemed clear I was maybe actually going to meet my challenge and had ten great songs under my belt, I decided to tempt fate.  Give a sneak peek and release my October song, The Electricity Doesn’t Like The Man, also under the Strangely Shaped By Fathers name, to let people know what I was up to.  Back then I just assumed I would release this thing as Strangely Shaped By Fathers.  I even thought that song would be the title track.  You know - because I’m doing this all electronically.  But the more I listened to the thing, and as I finished work on the final two songs, I realised that this was too personal a project to hide behind a band name I don’t even really like all that much and never really had.  A bad idea I felt somewhat stuck with.

So now, as I write this in December, the final song done and dusted and putting together these release notes, I decided - fuck it.  I’ll release it under my own name.  My first release as DaN McKee this since my very brief stint on the open mic singer/songwriter scene back in my university days.  I also decided to change the title from The Electricity Doesn’t Like The Man to Playing With Electricity - because that better described what I was doing with this project.  Playing.  Messing around.  Experimenting.  Having fun.  I could hardly say that the electricity didn’t like me when the electricity had given me a whole new voice!

So here it is - a year in my life distilled into twelve weird and wonderful songs very different from anything you’ve ever heard me do before in either SSBF, ANARCHOPHY, Bullet of Diplomacy, Whining Maggots or Academy Morticians.

We start in January with Pulse, a song about a very real and very frustrating symptom of anxiety I was suffering from that month (and the previous December): hearing my pulse loudly in my ear whenever I tried to sleep. A relapse of my old health anxiety I thought I had bid farewell to until a period of (self-imposed) unemployment and then the start of a new job re-triggered those muted old fears and made me feel like I was going to die every time I tried to rest.

By February, happily, I was settled again. Making friends with my dread. Hence, Make Friends With My Dread was the next song I wrote. Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen by way of NoMeansNo.  Anxiety again.  Multifaceted.  An inability to cope with uncertainty but a reminder of what I need to do to fight back.  And by March I was telling myself off: I Can’t Be Every Day writing dreary songs about being anxious and depressed! I needed some positivity and joy here too! (I also found a place to use a poem I had written earlier that month for a Philosophy Unleashed blog post).

Taking note of the need to write happy songs as well as depressing ones, in April I celebrated having found a publisher for my new book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, by writing a song of the same name.

May marked a turning point in the project because up until then I had been kind of so worried about getting the new song finished I didn’t really try to push myself that much. The songs I was writing sounded like songs.  Structures I was familiar with, lyrics that rhymed.  The song I wrote in May unlocked something new in my writing that I think I carried through all the way until December’s final track.  A realisation that I could write streams of consciousness and really open up my thoughts and sounds.  And We Dance is about the end of the world and our endless self-distraction from imminent, and preventable, threat.  In all honesty I think if I were choosing and curating which songs to release here based on quality, May to December would be the album, with January to April more of a first draft.  By May I had found my groove.

Unfortunately, the start of summer was also a busy time professionally.  In June, with school commitments and the release of my new book, I found myself Much Too Busy To Write so wrote about that (in the style of Sparks).  By July, working on this project by myself and not entirely enjoying the deafening silence which came as the reaction to the release of Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher (a silence all too familiar from the release of my first book, and every piece of music I have ever recorded), I decided to work through that nagging sense of uncertainty and disappointment probably familiar to anyone who has put their heart and soul out into the world and heard little back from the world in return.  To Greet My Noise.  Then it was time for a summer dance-floor banger: The Worm In Their Head - the promised ‘noise’ of the previous track.  I won’t be crushed by the world, oh no!  And if I can’t dance then it’s not my revolution.

Obviously September for any teacher means back to work.  The grindstone.  Things suddenly seem bleak again and it’s not just the return of high stress and high workload - the whole world seems to be fucked.  Life goes one, Until it Doesn’t.  Bleak by way of David Bowie - the real inspiration for most of this music to be fair.

October’s writing was right up to the bone.  It was almost Halloween and I had written nothing, so I decided to write my first ever Halloween song, chronicling all the weird and creepy supernatural experiences of my childhood and early adulthood into one spooky song.  Everything I talk about in there is true.  All of it.  A witch really did tell my mother The Electricity Doesn’t Like The Man.  Mom was a journalist and was interviewing the witch.  Our house at the time - the very same 86 from the Strangely Shaped By Fathers song of the same name was the house where our electrics blew constantly and where my parents’ rocky marriage groaned along…

Fearing I was descending into negativity again by year’s end, November’s song was inspired by the brief tour of anarchist and radical bookfairs I’d done in October/November to promote Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher.  A song about anarchy.  Proper anarchy.  The beautiful, wonderful, hopeful kind of anarchism that says ‘fuck your world because we’re building a better one’.  Ian Malcolm and the Anarchists got it right - life finds a way.  And by December, having already done a Halloween song and a summer dance track, it seemed only fitting to write a Christmas song.  My second ever.  (The first is SSBF’s ‘The Christmas I Could’ve Died’).  This one is also about death and Christmas - the attempted death of George Bailey in Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life.  I have a tattoo on my left arm of the sign which reads ‘You Are Now In Bedford Falls’ because the real message of that film is: don’t kill yourself.  I wear the tattoo as a reminder that we’re always in Bedford Falls, looking at the water from up on that bridge, and we need to remember not to jump because it really is a wonderful life.

So that’s the album.  That’s my year.   Here I am, once again ‘shouting out words loudly into the dark…Sharing myself into the void…Hoping for an echo back.  To at least acknowledge all the effort put into making a sound’.  I hope I don’t end up, once again, ‘reaching the finish line, alone, with no one there to celebrate as I cheer my own success in the silence of an empty room.’

I have convinced myself that this next one might actually count.  So much so, I’ve stuck my actual human name on it.  I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.